SASWAT: Structured Accessibility Stream for Web 2.0 Access Technologies

We are witnessing a profound change in the interaction model of the World Wide Web (Web). Documents, once created from a single source and delivering static client-side content, have now evolved into composite documents created from multiple third party sources delivering dynamically changing information streams. There are few interaction problems when delivering these parallel streams visually. The real problems arise due to the underlying incoherent nature of this 'new' Web model and the composite documents it creates. Changes in context and multiple dynamic updates all compete for the user's attention, producing an incoherent cacophony if the delivery is serial and in audio. Consequently, naive one--shot sensory translation can no longer support the user.This shift in the way the Web works comes with a corresponding increase in the cognitive load required for audio interaction. Without a full understanding of this evolving interaction model, along with its extent and context, the Web will rapidly become unable to support the interaction of visually disabled people.Our objective is to investigate, design, and build a homogeneous mapping framework to support the relating of competing visual streams into a single coherent and mediated accessibility stream such that when automatically applied to a Web document a mapping from parallel visual to serial audio can be achieved. Indeed, because serial mappings are cognitively simpler to understand we would also expect to see side-benefits in cognitive impairment, ageing, and the mobile Web (Whose users share a number of cognitive similarities with visually disabled users -- RIAM EP/E002218/1).To achieve this objective we propose to undertake fundamental research in the areas of: (a) the cognition and perception of dynamic Web based information; (b) the nature of the new Web interaction / infrastructure model as it evolves; and (c) new Web technologies when applied to visually disabled and sighted users. Thus, SASWAT is multidisciplinary with an industrial route to exploitation and has five major aims: 1) Carry out a fundamental investigation of the visual experiences of sighted individuals interacting with competing dynamic information streams in order to better understand the nature of their interaction; 2) Develop a profound understanding of the nature and evolution of the underlying Web infrastructure as it moves from a traditional stateless paradigm to one focused on composite / compound documents and `push' information streams;3) Build a model of Web interaction, based on this investigation, and a mapping of perceptual and cognitive interactivity from sighted to visually disabled users;4) Design and develop an experimental framework to mediate between the competing demands of compound Web pages and multiple information streams;5) Use our corpus of knowledge and experimental tools to perform a systematic and replicable evaluation of the utility of our approaches.